“When I hear foreigners complain that here there are no good roads, that here there are no ports, that here there are no gatherings, that here there are no promenades, that here… Well, if all that is true, and neither you nor I are going to fix it, then go gladly to London or Paris, and come back here in a hundred years, and I guarantee with my own head that by then you will find all that is now missing and much more.” José Milla y Vidaurre, Cuadros de costumbres (1871).1
More than a century and a half ago, José Milla y Vidaurre portrayed with irony the essence of a country that became accustomed to waiting. One hundred and fifty years later, we are still talking about the same things. There are not enough roads, nor efficient ports, nor agile procedures. Milla’s mockery became prophecy: Guatemala measures time in promises and excuses. Our relationship with time is painful; we feel it passing, but we do not take advantage of it.
It is not just unpunctuality —that almost folkloric Guatemalan habit— but a deeper perception: that of time stretching and dissolving. Every decision takes too long, every process seems designed so that nothing changes. Days pass without much happening. A country that does not know how to value its time also does not know how to create prosperity.
The World Bank, in its Business Ready (B-READY 2024) index, measures the capacity of economies to facilitate business activity. Guatemala was not even included. But our neighbors were, and the results are revealing: in both El Salvador and Costa Rica, Pillar III —Operational Efficiency is the weakest.2 Where processes take more time and cost more money, investment retreats, innovation slows, and growth withers. That pillar, which evaluates the flexibility and speed with which businesses operate, is one of the best thermometers of development.
The comparison with countries that do prosper is clear. Georgia, Rwanda, and Vietnam grow at more than 6% annually per person, three times faster than Guatemala, whose per capita growth hovers around 2%. In those economies, time is an input that is respected. The same happens with Singapore and Estonia: countries that turned temporal efficiency into a national value. The equation is simple: nations that value time generate wealth; those that waste it lose it.
Switzerland, without seas or minerals, founded its prosperity on precision. Its watchmaking industry is the most prestigious in the world and a national metaphor. Measuring time is mastering it; mastering it is creating value. Today Switzerland has the second-highest GDP per capita in the world among countries with more than one million inhabitants, second only to Ireland.3 It is followed by Singapore, Norway, and the United States. All understood something that we still have not: time is not possessed, it is managed.
José Milla knew it, even if he expressed it humorously: “The true chapín does not attend appointments, and if he does, he is always late… culture must walk among us at a turtle’s pace.” Behind the laughter lies a moral warning: slowness becomes habit, and habit becomes identity. And what a society normalizes as identity ends up becoming destiny.
That laziness with time is reflected throughout our public life: files that sleep, meetings that begin only when everyone arrives, projects announced every year but never started. Benjamin Franklin summarized it this way in 1748: “Remember that TIME is Money.”4 It was a moral principle: wasting time is wasting life.4 Max Weber stated in 1905 that wasting time was “the worst of sins,” because the duration of a life is too short to squander it.5 His analysis of Protestant asceticism showed how every minute can become discipline. And Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that saving time through the division of labor multiplies productivity.6 At its core, economic history is the history of how different cultures learned —or failed to learn— to value their time.
In nineteenth-century England, that awareness even reached the courts. From the tension between the rigor of Common Law and the flexibility of Equity emerged the legal clause “Time is of the essence,” which elevated punctuality to a moral and legal condition. Its modern formulation was consolidated with George James Turner in the case Roberts v. Berry (1853), when he held that equity could forgive delays, “unless the express stipulations (…) made time of the essence of the agreement.”7 Since then, English law has recorded a universal truth: a civilization is sustained by punctuality.
Our literature captured this same slow cadence from a different perspective. Miguel Ángel Asturias, in El Señor Presidente (1946), paints a dawn where the city awakens “half in reality, half in dream.” The rhythm is so dense that life advances with difficulty, as if time walked in fear.8 Luis Cardoza y Aragón in Guatemala: las líneas de su mano (1955), portrayed a country that seems to live in a suspended, almost ritual rhythm, where reality advances with the serenity of an ancient perfume.9 Between them, they left testimony of a nation that has never known how to accelerate without losing its soul.
Edmund Husserl, in Lectures on the Internal Consciousness of Time (1928), showed that time is not something we “measure”: it is the internal form of all experience. Without that temporal flow —retention, present, and protention, the immediate anticipation of what comes next— no action would be possible.10 Byung-Chul Han, in The Scent of Time (2015), warns that modernity lives trapped in a dispersion that breaks the continuity of experience.11 Guatemala, paradoxically, suffers the opposite illness: here time does not run; it dissolves. A little like our economy, so stable, almost inert.
But the slowness that in literature was poetry and in philosophy is reflection, in economics is condemnation. Every delayed procedure, every investment postponed, every official “waiting for instructions” is accumulated loss. Charles Duhigg, in Smarter Faster Better (2016), explains that productivity does not consist in doing more things, but in giving meaning to time.12 Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers (2008), reminds us that success is not the result of chance, but of disciplined and accumulated effort: the famous “ten-thousand-hour rule.”13 Both ideas agree on what is essential: time only produces wealth when it is organized.
How do we change such a culture? Let us begin with habits. Transformation does not arrive through speeches, but through routines: meetings that start on time, timely responses, processes measured in days and not months. Companies can become laboratories for this new temporal culture: establishing compliance metrics, rewarding efficiency, turning exact punctuality into a symbol of respect.
And at the national level, we need a slogan capable of inspiring a different identity: Guatemala on time. Let punctuality cease to be a rarity and become a source of pride. Let “ahorita” stop being an excuse and begin to mean “I already did it.” Let a country where time stood still finally learn to walk with precision.
Every lost minute is an opportunity that never returns. Guatemala’s backwardness is measured not only in kilometers of roads or megawatts of energy, but in wasted hours. When we learn to value time as gold is valued, we will discover that the true resource of development is not underground, but on the clock. Because, as the saying goes, even the saints mourn lost time —and Guatemala has spent two centuries mourning it.
Ramiro Bolaños, PhD.
Notes and References
- José Milla y Vidaurre, Sketches of Guatemalan Customs by Salomé Jil (Guatemala City: Imprenta de La Paz, 1882), pp. 13, 40, 50.
- World Bank, “Business Ready: Costa Rica.”
Business Ready Costa Rica - World Bank, “GDP per capita (current US$).”
World Bank GDP per capita data - Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” in The American Instructor (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1748), pp. 375–377.
Founders Online – Benjamin Franklin - Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 104.
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Amsterdam: MetLibri, 2007), p. 9.
- Roberts v. Berry, 22 Beav. 560, 52 Eng. Rep. 1299 (Court of Chancery, 1853), opinion by Lord Justice George James Turner.
Roberts v. Berry case reference - Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2016), pp. 21–22, 48.
- Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President (Havana: Editorial La Tertulia, 1946), pp. 19–20.
- Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Guatemala: The Lines of Its Hand (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955), pp. 15–17, 25–27, 30–34, 57–59.
- Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness: 1928 Lectures, translated by J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 34–35, 41–43, 47–48.
- Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time (Barcelona: Herder, 2015), pp. 9, 38–39, 103–104.
- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), p. xx.
